Using prepositions in context

In the cellar was chosen as the best place to hide the bodies.

An adposition may determine the grammatical case of its complement. In English, the complements of prepositions take the objective case where available (from him, not *from he). In Koine Greek, for example, certain prepositions always take their objects in a certain case (e.g., ἐν always takes its object in the dative), while other prepositions may take their object in one of two or more cases, depending on the meaning of the preposition (e.g., διά takes its object in the genitive or in the accusative, depending on the meaning). Some languages have cases that are used exclusively after prepositions (prepositional case), or special forms of pronouns for use after prepositions (prepositional pronoun).
The functions of adpositions overlap with those of case markings (for example, the meaning of the English preposition of is expressed in many languages by a genitive case ending), but adpositions are classed as syntactic elements, while case markings are morphological.
Adpositions themselves are usually non-inflecting ("invariant"): they do not have paradigms of form (such as tense, case, gender, etc.) the same way that verbs, adjectives, and nouns can. There are exceptions, though, such as prepositions that have fused with a pronominal object to form inflected prepositions.
The following properties are characteristic of most adpositional systems:

• 
  Adpositions are among the most frequently occurring words in languages that have them. For example, one frequency ranking for English word forms^[4] begins as follows (prepositions in bold):
  

the, of, and, to, a, in, that, it, is, was, I, for, on, you, …

• 
  The most common adpositions are single, monomorphemic words. According to the ranking cited above, for example, the most common English prepositions are on, in, to, by, for, with, at, of, from, as, all of which are single-syllable words and cannot be broken down into smaller units of meaning.
  
• 
  Adpositions form a closed class of lexical items and cannot be productively derived from words of other categories.
  

Classification by position[edit]
As noted above, adpositions are referred to by various terms, depending on their position relative to the complement.
While the term preposition is sometimes used to denote any adposition, in its stricter meaning it refers only to one which precedes its complement. Examples of this, from English, have been given above; similar examples can be found in many European and other languages, for example:

• 
  German: mit einer Frau ("with a woman")
  
• 
  French: sur la table ("on the table")
  
• 
  Polish: na stole ("on the table")
  
• 
  Russian: у меня ("in the possession of me" [I have])
  
• 
  Khmer: លើក្តារខៀន [ləː kdaːkʰiən] ("on (the) blackboard")
  
• 
  Tigrinya: አብ ልዕሊ ጣውላ [abː l:ali tawla] ("at/on top table"); አብ ትሕቲ ጣውላ [abː t:hti tawla] ("at/on under table")
  

In certain grammatical constructions, the complement of a preposition may be absent or may be moved from its position directly following the preposition. This may be referred to as preposition stranding (see also below), as in "Whom did you go with?" and "There's only one thing worse than being talked about." There are also some (mainly colloquial) expressions in which a preposition's complement may be omitted, such as "I'm going to the park. Do you want to come with [me]?", and the French Il fait trop froid, je ne suis pas habillée pour ("It's too cold, I'm not dressed for [the situation].") The bolded words in these examples are generally still considered prepositions, because when they form a phrase with a complement (in more ordinary constructions) they must appear first.
A postposition follows its complement to form a postpositional phrase. Examples include:

• 
  Latin: mecum ("with me", literally "me with")
  
• 
  Turkish: benimle or benim ile ("with me", literally "my with")
  
• 
  Chinese: 桌子上 zhuōzi shàng (lit. "table on"); this is a nominal form which usually requires an additional preposition to form an adverbial phrase (see Chinese locative phrases)
  
• 
  English: ten kilometers away, ten months ago (both could be considered adverbs)
  

Some adpositions can appear either before or after their complement:

• 
  English: the evidence notwithstanding OR notwithstanding the evidence
  
• 
  German: meiner Meinung nach OR nach meiner Meinung ("in my opinion")
  
• 
  German: die Straße entlang OR entlang der Straße ("along the road"; here a different case is used when entlang precedes the noun)
  

An adposition like the above, which can be either a preposition or a postposition, can be called an ambiposition.^[5] However, ambiposition may also be used to refer to a circumposition (see below),^[6] or to a word that appears to function as a preposition and postposition simultaneously, as in the Vedic Sanskrit construction (noun-1) ā (noun-2), meaning "from (noun-1) to (noun-2)".^[7]
Whether a language has primarily prepositions or postpositions is seen as an aspect of its typological classification, and tends to correlate with other properties related to head directionality. Since an adposition is regarded as the head of its phrase, prepositional phrases are head-initial (or right-branching), while postpositional phrases are head-final (or left-branching). There is a tendency for languages that feature postpositions also to have other head-final features, such as verbs that follow their objects; and for languages that feature prepositions to have other head-initial features, such as verbs that precede their objects. This is only a tendency, however; an example of a language that behaves differently is Latin, which employs mostly prepositions, even though it typically places verbs after their objects.
A circumposition consists of two or more parts, positioned on both sides of the complement. Circumpositions are very common in Pashto and Kurdish. The following are examples from Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji):

•